Sunday, November 11, 2012

Today we caught a couple episodes of Doomsday Preppers on the tv. We hadn't seen that show before as it was not available in Germany so it was pretty interesting. Some things definitely jumped out at me.

First the amount of people who were very prepared but seriously overweight amazed me. I'm not talking could stand to lose a few pounds or a bit of a belly but strait up obese. I just don't get it. The odds they will have to walk more than a couple miles, maybe carrying a moderate load like a get home bag, face a physical confrontation or pull their body over an obstacle are far higher than that they will need a year's worth of food, a Faraday cage or whatever. Also even if they have the discrete skills to survive a gunfight their fat body might not be able to move fast enough and their already taxed heart might give out due to the stress. I talk physical fitness a lot here. Running, lifting heavy things, ruck marching and generally how to be a modern day guerrilla or whatever else you wanna call it. You do not have to do what I do exactly but for goodness sake do something.

Other than that rather obvious note the biggest thing that jumped out at me were gaping holes in peoples preps. Mostly it was people with otherwise great setups that had no serious security plans. Some were seemingly intimidated by the subject and others were back to nature gardening types that are rather naive to the ways of the world.

I decided to do some testing with our little Bruton solar charger. It did a great job charging 2 AA batteries (holds 4 but I only had 2 dead ones) in about 2 hours. I tried charging a device via the USB port some time ago and it failed for undiagnosed reasons. However it did just fine with the batteries and they are what is really important so that is good. Looking at getting a bigger setup. Something large enough to charge a few devices and run some lights. Goal 0 makes some pretty nice stuff.